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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.

Make the data public if you want to see progress

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From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.

Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.

Unless Palantir has code that overrides US laws (the US CLOUD act specifically), they are a US company and there is zero protection from anyone in the US that has (secret or not) subpoena power. Yes, secret subpoena power exists. That includes the NSA, Congress, police, investigative judges, US youth services (yes, really), state legislatures of all states, including some territories, the White House and thus Trump, the list goes on and on and on and on.

Including organizations like NSA and CIA that have already shown they use these powers, classify everything secret, while lying about it even to the US Congress.

FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.

Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.

What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.

This is not a good faith argument

Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.

If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.

I trust Palantir about the same as I trust the Chinese government with my health data.

Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).

Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.

Your caveats of "rarely" and "usually" undermine the "anything" you use.

The edit is naive to an extent that makes one wonder if you are writing in good faith.

It depends on the contract with palantir. So in reality it depends on how NHS structured the contract and the infrastructure. That's the reason for rarely/usually.

I don't work for palantir or own their stock. There is really no reason for me to do anything in bad faith here.

We use Microsoft Windows, HP, Dell, AWS and Chinese made hardware... All foreign designed and built tech stack.

But for some reason Palantir is the bad one?

Not to the public, but University hospitals often have researchers trudging through their data. Junior doctors often audit patient data. Palantir isn't the first organisation to look at patient data.

> My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.

Because they pay better.

Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?

There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.

The "government does nothing for itseld" thing..... I am not sure thats true. Pretty sure the government is the single biggest employer in the country a d I dont think that even counts contractors

Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.

This comment isn’t as much of an exaggeration as it seems, at least regarding engineering. At a previous job, I was tasked with helping a product line achieve certification to a government standard. The public facing government contact I interacted with was just a middle man with the consultancy, ICF, who actually developed and maintained the standards, to government specifications. Also, those government specifications had significant input from industry.

Palantir provide the software stack, they don't do the research.

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